Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Since the holidays are over, its now time for construction in Costa Rica. The locals decided to block one of the only major highways in the country for going on over thirty five minutes. Lucky for us, we ended up at the beginning of the line and had Master in the car. It took him only around a minute with the workers before the cones went up and they quickly got out of the way. Of course, this was after a few nervous looking men walked over to the workers and bailed out of any confrontation by getting on their phones and taking the walk of shame back to their cars without saying a word.

To which we offer a smattering of amendments, having conducted said journey through the tropical wilds at the wheel of a particularly shining silver steed.

Firstly, it's always time for construction in Costa Rica. It's not so much a matter of "growing development", this, but a necessary consequence of the brutal facts of ekeing out a civilization of sorts amongst the verdant exuberance of the land. Potholes. Sinkholes. Collapsed bridges, fallen switchbacks, obliterated pipes, all "repaired" inexpertly but with great enthusiasm, all contributing to a constant critical mass of catastrophe.

This time, the problem was mild enough: the yellow median had fallen just this side of invisible, and the poks1 had gathered up their very best paint in their very best mini-pokmog, eager to make the road safe again for the 40kph natives and the 140kph foreigners who weave around them. Except they decided to close down the entire road for the proceedings. As in, with roadblocks. Both directions. Whether this was an honest if inept attempt at safety or the effects of sheer wonderment at their own technology I couldn't tell you, but it was certainly several shades of ridiculous.

Valiant Prince MP ventured forth to the bevestacled2 roadslave and demanded an ETA. Thirty minutes. Which is an insane askance on the one and only road to the nation's northeast at ten in the morning on a thursday, but patience is well-coddled by comfort, something our horse has in spades. Ever play "I spy" in the rainforest?3 We didn't, but anyway. Thirty-five minutes went by, according to the bimbo's ever-faithful watch. A motley stream of family heads, some in characteristic pastel plaid button-downs and flip-flops, others in JC Penny-diaspora slacks and stacked heels, shuffled awkwardly towards the workers to lodge complaints throughout.

Here's how Costa Rican complaints go:

"Hey buddy, how's it going?"
"Oh fuck me dude, everything's so great, I'm so happy to see you!"
"Back atcha, friend. I thought, mayhap, there was, possibly, a thing not entirely great afoot?"
"I'm sure it's possible, but whatever, shit's great in general and mostly in particular!"
"I couldn't agree with you more. May all your days be glorious."
"May yours be better! Remember, I've two kidneys, should you need one!"

Fifty-fifty shot a hug goes here. Mind you, as the bimbo pointed out, actual confrontation was rare; for the most part these exemplars of effectuality merely approached the worker at not-quite shouting distance and tapped plaintively at their electronic rectangles4, only to walk back to their cars moments later, as though their subtle show of guarded inquiry were sufficient for anything at all.

But as I was saying, thirty-five minutes went by. At which point MP left his leathery cushioning and motored himself towards his municipal amigo again. I wasn't within earshot, but here's how (this) MP complaint went, from my perch:

MP approaches road worker at breakneck speed. Worker visibly if ever so slightly receeds from his post.MP's arms rise to either side in exasperated parentheses.Worker points in the general direction of the painting aparatus, shrugs.MP's frame straightens, despite the impression it was already perfectly straight.The handful of road workers previously lolling about in the adjacent vines chewing plantain chips get on their feet and move in to reinforce their colleague, meanwhile grown shorter and blown further back from his original stand.The Blue-Red-and-White disco-dance, a possible misunderstanding of further pointing, squatting, and shrugging.The ...5 aggressor delivers his fatal blow; left hand held slightly underneath, his right makes three decisive chopping motions --one to the left, one at center, one at right. This catalyzes the workers' retreat; they regroup a meter or so back.A walkie-talkie is produced and passed frantically from one worker to the next. MP is stone-still.After a beat, the workers run to the assembled cones comprising the road block and lift them.

So swift was the demolition that MP was obliged to run back to the car, lest he encourage 40kphers to overtake us. And that's how we almost lost half an hour on the ride in.

* * *

Pok, noun, that species of Orc which proves lovable through its earnestness and innocuous nature despite its Orcdom. [↩]

So it happened this morning, as it fairly often does, that my reading of a Trilema article1 set off what I can only call The Churning, a distinct psychophysical sensation involving more or less every organ which threatens to culminate in a nervous fit if the inspiring material is not further examined and personally atypical considerations are not ingested.2 That sentence aside, allow me to specify3 two precursors:

The "for women" part is provided by weakass sauce like some minor plot token pointing out to the hero that since his lordship, who knows quite a lot about male antecessors older than his greatfather, nevertheless knows exactly nothing about any women in the same line, even should they be younger than his grandmother, therefore it (the plot token) could in fact very well be the very grandmother in question.

The pretense involved, if it wasn't thickly laid out enough and it could take further belabouring, being that women are equally important to men, and equally meaningful and therefore notable, but "unfair arrangements" make men remembered and women forgotten.

Pro tip : just because whichever god is stuck fucking the same Geea to make people, dun mean neither that people are all god's children, nor that there is or can be such a thing as "the goddess". The gods are all different, and earth is no goddess.

I brought these to breakfast, intent on using without abusing my unfathomably fabulous access to the very font of such allergens and their alleviations: the author. What follows is my distillation; inadequate as it may be for severe or obscure cases, I hope it offers some degree of support where it may.

I.

The emboldened passage led me on first pass to wonder whence and wherefore came the notion that women aren't equally important, meaningful, or notable to men. I suspected retreat into the concept of "non-equality", as in "no two things are equal" or such. Not the case; analysis of the problem here begins with the quantitative, hinted at in the preceding paragraph: "who knows quite a lot about male antecessors older than his greatfather." The set of this (or any given spring chicken's) antecessors is easily brushed aside as "big", or even "very big", but these are unexamined and unspecific.

If we take a loose approximation of man's time on this earth, say 100,000 years, and suppose every generation is about 20, we're left with 5,000 generations. In terms of individuals, then, we're left with no less than 25000, as every one was borne of two, one man and one woman, without exception. To get an idea of the size of the number of individuals, we'll move from base two to base ten and notice4 that 25000 ~= 101500, a number with 1500 digits. Divide it by two and you'll have, quantitatively anyway, two exact halves with fifteen hundred digits each. Exactly as many men as women, a minor miracle existing nearly nowhere, certainly rarely amongst things touched by the hand of man. Two particularly well made cups might be identical to three or maybe four digits; two CPUs perhaps twelve, at the cost of billions in fixed capital. There is no such thing known to man's industry or artifice as fifteen hundred digit equality, perfect and unyielding, exactly exact forever. In any case, the war was won by barely similar machinery.

The statement of fact that foremothers and forefathers are exactly equally sized, despite their incredible abundance, passes unremarked upon by the friendly fiend. The problem rather raises from MacDonald's proposal those two groups be equally important, meaningful, or notable. Yet why is it Anondos "knows quite a lot about male antecessors"? I proposed it was because those male antecessors did something. What else is there to know about someone, anyway? MacDonald might've countered, as I did (indeed, myself!), that it is inherent in feminine nature to keep quiet about doing, and to just do, whereas men are inclined to fabulate, to insist they've done what they've not, or to make the knowledge that they'd done something the focal point of the doing. This may even be true, yet what difference does it make? If indeed that's the female nature, then that's the female nature --nature no doubt is naturally happy in its nature. If it isn't, someone's lying, but in any case, there is not nor can there be such a thing as objective meaning. That, after all, is the one lesson of human inquiry.

What, then, is meaningful? What does MP's "...and equally meaningful and therefore notable" actually say? I proposed that if the trumpeting of deeds trumps the deeds themselves for meaning, let us all retire from doing and join for instance the Power Rangers or whoever else. At which point I was ready to receive the crux, staring out at me from the very beginning of the sentence I'd objected to5!

The pretense. MP describes the author's pretense. Of course the Power Rangers are the meaningful party to them, and of course MacDonald proposes some unknown females are nevertheless meaningful to his character, as part of the traperdition of placating the talkers and dreamers of the world by idly pretending that they're just as much a part of that world as the doers. I asked MP why he thought MacDonald dunnit. "He thinks that's how you write fantasy. But it's cheap fantasy, cardboard fantasy." Don't you find?

II.

What then of goddesses? Why would gods be talked about as though their possibility were unquestionable, and goddesses rejected as a very conceptual possibility? I was asked to produce a god. I chose Zeus6, and when asked "what is the thing about Zeus?", offered a beard and lightning bolts. Yet it turns out the ancient Greeks codified mythology as a tool, just as well-oiled and ready to be used as the fractions I'd been fumbling over in I. above, and there's a lot more to it than aesthetic tokens and mundane symbology.

The correct answer is: Zeus said "...and if you don't like it you can all grab a ring and I will grab the other side and throw you all across the sky." Cronos ate his children. Athena struck at her father's skull with her lance from inside 'til he had her birthed just to stop the pain. Diana kept her ass hidden from they who wanted to see it. Gods do, and the doing defines the godhead; Gaia7 "just is".

"So are there goddesses or not?" I asked. "What about Athena, what about Thetis, Diana?" "They did. They have tits, they're still male."

At this point it might occur to you, as it did to me, that MP's use of language --"goddess" vs "do-nothing", "men" vs "the only parties to actual activity"-- can only be fairly described as a pretense of its own. Why not state it plainly, the lazy and idiotic are therefore not as good?

It's pretense vs. pretense, and even if you don't favor the method, I doubt you can argue it's not wildly instructive for the audience.

* * *

MP proposes said article's title is incomprehensible, but I have the answer key. Neener. [↩]

It is, to be sure, a blessed illness, and I know of no better, and certainly no swifter, way to learn or grow than by tending to it; text that never makes one feel sick is as so much government cheese, irradiated of culture and shelf-stabilizing unto one's death. [↩]

I'd like to note for my own self-immolation that none of the reasoning herein contained blossomed forth from my own brainpan. Part of the The Churning's cure is the revelation of the number and size of one's holes in knowledge and dams to facility. Never ever believe anyone who proposes you "don't need" or "just aren't meant for" or etc, math. Innumeracy will suck your life away, guaranteed. [↩]

No shit, actually intelligent people order what they say by importance; imagining an opener is decorative is bound to fuck you up. [↩]

And quickly regretted it, asking to change to "a less complex? one" for the sake of lower outlier example potential. My request was denied. [↩]

What is any particular being responsible for? The greater difficulty of this question results from a fundamental misunderstanding of what responsibility means in the first place. Typically it's confused with guilt, inasmuch as a question as to irresponsibility is likely to arise only when shit has somewhere met a fan, and a culprit or scapegoat is sought. But being responsible doesn't necessarily mean having fucked something up. Rather, it is the state --quite without qualitative consideration-- of being he who answers.

For himself, for a sequence of events, for other people, for acts of god, whatever it may be. A person can be responsible for anything, so long as they can answer for that thing, which means delivering rationale capable of fully satisfying any and every reasonable question about said thing. The old trope of someone being told they're "not responsible for the entire world" speaks then not to the emotional pressure of feeling guilty or having urges to help others, but to the factual impossibility of being actually answerable for every other human being, to all the other human beings.

It follows that being responsible, then, isn't something that can be jotted into a schedule just-so; there's no seat-of-the-pants way to be answerable as the state itself is defined by constancy. Yes, and forethought, but forethought without follow-through of internalization and continual perception and reaction is exactly the substance of so many protestations against irresponsibility by the well-intentioned. Setting aside some time for a thing is eminently not the same as overseeing it. Just ask the last couple of generations of kids that spent their childhoods attending "family time" and who otherwise lack any actual family worth the mention.

It also follows that responsibility isn't something that can be levied on someone; the onus to be responsible, yes, but in actual fact only an agent may be responsible, and only by actually being so. There's absolutely no space for subjectivity or interpretation; one is responsible or not, and whether they were told or begged to be so or whether nobody even knew is entirely incidental.

Responsibility is a state, and I'm hard-pressed for an example of someone who could demonstrably turn it on and off, switching as convenient. Sure, some selection is required in the bag; one must pick who and what they'll answer for. Maybe one's even stuck with the responsibility for something they'd rather never consider again. This is also part and parcel of the concept, however. Dropping something when it becomes unpleasant, when one's ability seems to falter, letting it slip one's mind, even, are tantamount to irresponsibility. That's not even a bad thing, in itself, either! Remember: there's no qualitative aspect involved, here. It's just a state. Sometimes being irresponsible is the right thing.

In any case, though, constancy is an absolute requirement. "I'll take the responsibility" may never be something said after the fact, but only before it. A lack of understanding as to whether it could happen again, as to whether the doohickeys involved were green or red or fat or old, necessarily denotes irresponsibility, no matter whether one tried, or how hard, or how great they are, or anything else.

Friedrich von Ingenohl, that is. Ever heard of him? Me neither, 'til I served dinner tonight and after the third bite of Orange Chicken it was "So let me ask you this." ("Ask me.") "How did World War I start?". We won't belabor the precious few paragraphs that followed, accepted more or less as they were after several years of violent dissociation from ninth grade social studies and the occasional quasi-conscious polish. Of specific interest is those paragraphs' reward, the following cascade: 1) Germany decided it lost the war because of traitorous elements among its own people; 2) reality decided that Germany lost the war because it failed at sea; 3) the very sailors witness to this failure eventually had enough and threw their silly hats into the ring of the revolution that spawned the Weimar Republic. Freidrich von Ingenohl sits at the center of this sequence, having thoroughly embodied the failure at sea responsible for Germany's loss of WWI, and arguably therefore WW2, and arguably thence-and-hence-forth.

Ingenohl received his post as commander-in-chief of the German Navy in 1913 after nearly forty years of dicking about with the same outfit in East Asia. His inheritance was a capable fleet not at all subject to the "inferior materiel problem" that might vaguely rattle around between the ears of poor sods originally educated in the same sad schooling system as I. No, Ingenohl's navy was stacked with excellent battleships and submarines, and he brought several dozen to fuck up England's northeast coast in December of 1914, including a few very heavy dreadnoughts. Some of these he left as massive reinforcements stationed a little closer to home, "just in case". Despite an arguably superior naval force and despite the considerable advantage of being able to sit in port while England's ships were obliged to patrol, Ingenohl was nervous. Possibly he contracted it from the Kaiser, who'd warned him to avoid unnecessary losses, whatever that means. In any case, Ingenohl was nervous, and he went to war with it.

His underling Admiral Hipper took a few of the ships close to shore, where they damaged a few ports and several hundred port-dwellers. The weather was on the Germans' side --the fog gave the land batteries an extra challenge-- and England had a slow start rousing ships for defense. Eventually she sent a submarine, and Hipper fled. George Warrender1, Vice-Admiral of the Royal Navy, gave chase with a motley, but small, assortment. The shitty weather and report of a single enemy ship spotted prompted Warrender to send a mere six battleships towards the lurking behemoth of Ingenohl's reserve force. Shots were fired; at least three of the British ships were hit; one in particular managed to fire a torpedo from its flailing wreckage; it was not really quite dawn yet; Ingenohl was nervous. There was smoke and noise and hey maybe the entire fucking Royal Navy is nigh and Kaiser said "careful"! So he left.

He'd've blown Warrender's business to smithereens with ease, but he left. With the exception of naval minister Alfred von Tirpitz, who had already been throwing fits about Ingenohl and protested that he'd had the fate of Germany in his hand at that moment, nobody seems to have been conscious of the meaning of this abject failure. Men stuck sitting around the docks and dinghies Ingenohl oversaw apparently took a confused sort of umbrage; but the official lines, in and out of Germany, forgot and forgave Ingenohl in some magic admixture that prevents his psychological disorder from being studied as much as it deserves.

Have you ever watched something get built from scratch? Precursors included; packaged convenience left entirely by the wayside?

Have you ever thrown out an idea because the very tower of necessaries that must be made aforehand seems to grow at a rate greater than your ability to make them? Have you ever sacrificed the correct assemblage of a thing in favor of a pre-existing solution? The "what can you do?" excuse is there, always waiting to slick its tongue in the door when the finite nature of one's time on earth is weighed against the laundry list of one's self-appointed tasks.

However tempting it may be to decry the toil of The Right Thing, it is still right. However much of a bargain The Cheap Thing1 may present, it is still a bad bargain if it leaves The Right Thing behind.

Building from scratch is an awesome difficulty. It is also one of the few things worth doing in a world where most have spent their lives contributing to cheap, wrong, packaged convenience rather than the paving of correct steps towards actual goals2.

Let us witness, then, the triumphs of one Mircea Mircescu:

My own poor Grenadine was nearly deafened by the trumpets of her fellow's several successive victories. Were she not obliged to offer a vivat and quaff a spot of Alchemist's Cheap Gin each time, she might've even been lucid enough to have achieved something, herself!

The ranking of pots won over the past thirty days. I hear Daniel Barron is looking to break into the carabiner market.

Perhaps it could be said that it's easier for a virtual man to build himself such glories from scratch than for a man of meat. Mircescu, ostensibly, felt no pangs of the stomach or loins3, had no consideration for sleep or toothache, and was never interrupted by blitzes of Sprint vs. MCI callcenter rate offers.

Nevertheless, he was still obliged to pull grass from the earth until there was enough with which to make rope. To use rope to haul in flotsam from the shore until it could be worked with other such trifles, just as hardly won, to make tools. Solely to make the further purchase of trifling items more practicable. Eulora's seemingly oppressive chain of requisites for anything resembling progress is as a poem for reality. Removed from the hard fact of actually bleeding fingers as felt in the world beyond the borders of the screen, its world permits a more visible, paradoxically more tangible, affair between right and reward.

Not that it's any clearer what The Right Thing is. But Mircescu seems to have a decent hunch. And he ought to be celebrated.

Huzzah!

* * *

The Wrong Thing may be just as toilsome, and so employed as a result of confusion, or of outright malice. The Cheap Thing, and look that it's not even properly codified, the insidious bastard, isn't necessarily wrong, it's just necessarily less toilsome. The fact that what is Cheap is often also Wrong is the only true evil I know, and the principal problem of anyone attempting to move rationally through their existence. [↩]

I do not pretend to have, nor do I imagine I ever will, fully digest or even be entirely aware of the work of human history's exceptions. The sentiment is rather born of the experience of "modern living", inasmuch as that means the very state of having to trudge through ever-enthickening swamps of "solutions" that are nothing like solutions at all. [↩]

Though I hear something along these lines is being brewed for implementation. [↩]

Then create a config file by specifying the full path of your installation in the prefix above followed by --makeconf . ZNC's docs suggest znc --makeconf alone will do this; ten wasted minutes of my life suggest otherwise.

You'll have to pick a port for ZNC to listen on among the prompts that follow. Otherwise, default options've proven fine for me. Launch ZNC when prompted at the end of the configuration dialogue.

Now all that's squared away, official docs and search result flotsam step in with the true timewasting bullshit of dropping anything resembling actionable steps, sense, or the English fucking language. All IRC users are also goats of the same age and gender, right? No need to declare antecedents for "the" password, just dandy to specify "server" password in some forms but not others, certainly no problem to be explicit to the degree of telling folks to cd to a fucking directory but neglecting to mention which network components need what information, and where.

So then, first tell ZNC where you want it to connect via the same's webadmin. Point your browser to http://your.server's.ip:portyouspecified/ . Log in, mosey to "Your settings" on the right-hand menu, and add a network with irc.freenode.net, port 6697. Check the SSL box. Put something you like in the "network name" field up top. Hit "save and return" at the very bottom of the page.

Now, tell your IRC client how to connect to ZNC. I used xchat, where this stuff is accessed under xchat/network list. Click "Add", highlight the stupid default server name that pops up, and enter your.ZNC.server's.ip:portyouspecified . Yes, the separator shows in established server details as a forward slash. Yes, the syntax is actually a forward slash. No, entering the same forward slash will not fucking work, it'll overwrite what you entered with the original default bullshit. Give it a colon; it'll convert it into a forward slash on return. This shit's so enraging they ought to market it as a depilation treatment.

Anyway, in the User name field, enter your ZNC admin name, forward slash (no kidding, it works on its own now), network name from the ZNC webadmin network settings (that very same something you like). The server password is the same as your ZNC webadmin password. Feed it your Nickserv password if it makes you happy. Close the dialogue and connect.

***

Shitty mixed metaphors brought to you by hours of enraged wrangling; may this guide spare you similar emissions. [↩]

This is the Pizarro shared box's openssl path at the time of this writing, change as needed. [↩]

"Hey, get my other pair of underwear out of the trunk?"
"Anything else?"
"And the water."
"You want some fruit?"
"Yeah. Bring the banana for the crabs."
"And an apple? Orange? Some juice?"
"Bring the whole lot. Better yet, bring the whole car."

There's a sweet spot between the convenience of mobile provisions and the hassle of managing all the little tasks that go into stocking, sorting, packing, and retrieving, where that which one wants, one gets, with minimal administration. Banal as it may seem, there's little better than supreme and simple outfitting in the remote wild, which is where the preceeding exchange took place --a place with orders of magnitude more hermit crabs than people, by count, by mass, by whatever metric you'd like.

Apparently hermit crabs like bananas, among other things it's hard to imagine stumbling upon just-so on a shore human scrapsmaking rarely blesses. A particularly ripe one went in, therefore, with the other trunkstuffs unknown to beachkind, like a towel large enough to accommodate any particular angle of lazing about, and a thermos full of clove-infused cafe au lait.

I navigated surf-smoothed1 feet through the short trail of hot sand towards the car, skipping over judgment-browed iguanas and fraying coconut husks. And stopped cold. A heron! Head stretched tall in wary regard, he spent but a second to raise his wings and fly from just in front of the hood to a grassy clearing some feet away.

Leaving him be to continue his automobile inspection2, I returned to The Great Towel Island with All the Trunk Things and the Banana Relief for Hermitty Victims of Crabreality began in earnest. Three grand chunks were flung, and several perambulating shells were observed approaching, and eventually coming to rest upon, the soft yellow anomaly.

Then came the crow, swift, merciless, and robbed these gentle curmudgeons of one chunk (the reader may take comfort in the report that no crabs were seen still attached)! A few minutes passed -- a heated discussion on the provenance of the winch took place -- seawater previously imbibed found routes from out of various holes in various heads. The crow returned. A female, stricken with that particular cruel joke of sexual dimorphism favoring males with brilliant oil-slick blues while the girls go brownly by. She landed several feet from her desired prize, unsure if the banana bit was a bit too close to wiggling toes. She meekly approached, foot-gawk-foot, --and I laughed wholeheartedly at the cautious maneuver, which sent the bird hopping back a ways. She eyed me, attempted one step bananawise, and sent me pealing again. Three times more with this routine and she had had it, sitting sadly on a branch back at the treeline. Apparently it's not only adolescent boys who cannot abide the sound of women laughing. All the better for the crabs, who care not for such trifles --for they are neither sea, nor salt, nor slightly rotten fruit.

Back in the valley, it happened one afternoon that we'd been walking mile after bus-flanked mile over unsteady sidewalks, klaxon-blasted and asphalt-fatigued into desperation for a break. What luck that a certain "anime cafe" was there, tucked into the parking lot of an office supply store. Rainbow-ropelights and well-trod astroturf stairs beckoned. Into dayglo knick-knack paradise we oozed. Did you know that Costa Rica has some of the best, ripest, loveliest tropical fruit in the world? Costa Ricans do not know. For which reason you're well-advised, when ordering anything fruit-based here, to request the item "sin azucar". I forgot to ask Gothic Alice in Wonderland to omit the stuff from my guanabana batido, no doubt distracted by the Hello Kitty popcorn machine and 4' Domo-kun plushie staring me down in the hallway.

It was like trying to drink one of those scented markers from second grade. And it came with whatever this guy is --though I must admit I can't locate him again, and that possibly he was a mere hallucination caused by the two gulps of sugar-with-some-guanabana-in-it I took before pushing Diabetes Tumbler (that's a "medium", for the record) aside.

Getting what you want is a lot easier in the middle of nowhere.

The sand here is volcanic, varyingly fine, and this particular time actually managed to bleed my ankles a little in the rather turbulent waves. That aside, best pedicure one could ask for. [↩]

I received no official papers indicating pass or fail by review of Heronity. [↩]

The recently-released patch for comments has been included, as has a minor cosmetic/derpatic change to image files, the names of which no longer contain spurious remnants of their pre-svgization filetypes.